A terrible movie by a great director

Rating: 3/10 (24 February 2012)

I really can't see how people can actually say that the movie's "one of the best of its genre". It starts off okay and builds up a lot of tension throughout the first half of the movie, for example I found the encounter with the infected priest pretty good and the scene in which the "zombies" if you will, chase the main heroes up the stairway was kinda intense too, but nothing about it was really scaring me at any point and that is, in my opinion a K.O. argument for a horror movie, except maybe if the premise and overall plot is good. And in 28 Days later it isn't.
To be fair, this is "just" a zombie movie and I can imagine that it is pretty hard to come up with an original, inspired plot for that genre, but in the first half of the movie, everything that happens you have seen in any shitty zombie movie before. I mean don't get me wrong - it's not a terrible story, but it's nothing special. It's just okay. And "okay" can sometimes be much worse than "terrible". Not only the story, but also the characters are very shallow. Literally no one in this film, I can recall having a personality and thus the very predictable romance isn't very captivating as well.
But that all changes about 60 minutes into the movie, because then the movie decides to become a character study all of the sudden. And you know what? It failed and I might even go on and say that the second half is the worst part about the film and therefore ruins the entire movie. If you wanna see a character study of these people you could as well just study the social behavior of brooms during mating season.
Another really big problem is the camera. Again in the first half it wasn't anything Oscar-worthy, but it never stood out in a negative way. Now in the second half either the cameraman had a seizure or (and that's the more likely theory) they just stopped giving a damn. It's even worse than in Quantum of Solace or Transformers. I just couldn't figure out what was going on on the screen.
So if it hadn't been for the last 50 minutes I'd say give it a watch, but I literally have rarely seen a film that degrades so much the longer you're watching. If you want to watch a good recent zombie film you should check out Dawn of the Dead (2004), (REC), or 21 Weeks Later which is the much better sequel to 21 Days Later. So do yourself a favour and avoid this movie, it is not even worth the time opening the DVD case of it.